Enable and use open source radeon drivers in a muxless hybrid graphics (Intel/AMD) setup

Introduction

It should be no news to people who have been closely following the open source driver development that it was a hit and miss trying to enable radeon drivers. This tutorial might be useful to those users who have been unaware of how to enable dynamic gpu switching at runtime. Thanks to reddit user JackDostoevsky, who wrote the necessary steps to set it up, this tutorial was possible. This tutorial is just the re-iteration of that post. Read this post, if you want to follow the discussion. I have taken a more conservative approach of installation in this tutorial. If you want to checkout git versions, follow above discussion. In case of ubuntu, I am using 13.04 (linux 3.8) with xorg-edgers ppa. Performance wise in a game under wine, this setup was garbage. While in arch, I got better FPS compared to using just the Intel graphics card. Though the performance of native games were largely improved. Therefore in this case, newer versions of the driver and kernel packages are always better.

Install catalyst driver in ubuntu 12.04.2

Introduction

In this tutorial, I will try to explain how to install catalyst driver, fix switching problems (specially opengl part on intel cards) and some steam bugs. One reason to do this tutorial was because catalyst 13 series was not very good on my hardware in Ubuntu 13.04 or Mint 15. So, lets get started

AMD graphics cards, Linux basic power management

Introduction

If you buy a new laptop with Intel processors and AMD graphics cards, you by default run into this long running dual, hybrid graphics problem under Linux. This post is targeted towards new Linux users, who haven’t dealt with such kinds of problems before.

Fix catalyst driver installation in Ubuntu

1. Introduction

I found lots of people struggling to get catalyst driver work in Ubuntu. This issue has been persistent for some laptops, ever since Ubuntu 13.04 came out, specially for Intel, AMD dual graphics setup. For people, who have been looking at catalyst drivers since http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1930450 post was published, should not be that hard to find the solution, but for those who are new to Linux, or don’t have time for these kinds of issues, this might be a show stopper bug.

Comparing different desktop environments on Ubuntu in terms of speed using fgl_glxgears

It is not fair to say certain desktop environment is faster than others only based on fgl_glxgears’s output. There are many more factors than, just having some FPS gain in an opengl tool to consider a desktop environment over others. One more fact to consider, a distro which has say e.g. twm as default window manager might have more benefits (ease of use, performance) than running on Ubuntu. Following results reflect the output on my hardware, and might be different on yours even on similar setup.

Few years back, I was even unable to boot without using acpi off. When catalyst drivers started working on this hardware, it started to become better every time. With this new release the performance was even better. I was eager, how each desktop environment take advantage of this, so I wrote this article.

How to setup AMD/Intel Hybrid graphics cards in Linux (Ubuntu)

Introduction

In this tutorial, I will list the steps I take to setup AMD catalyst driver under Ubuntu Linux. I hope someone finds it useful.

I will not say, it works for all hybrid graphics setup. So here is my computer’s specification.

Operating System : 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04
Processor : Intel sandy bridge (2nd generation), specifically Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30GHz
Graphics Cards: Intel HD 3000 and AMD Radeon HD 6470M
RAM: 4 GB